Page 33 of Careless Whisper (Modern Vintage Romances #11)

Elias

W orking in a small clinic was humbling. No one gave a rat’s ass where I went to school, what papers I’d published, or what titles followed my name. All they cared about was one thing: could I help them. That went for the staff just as much as it did for the patients.

However, the best part was working with Reggie again.

Ever since we treated Quito—the ten-year-old with a puncture wound and nerves of steel, who came by a couple of weeks later with warm tamales to say thank you—the current between us had started to shift.

Reggie and I had begun spending time together outside the clinic.

Walks through town. Long talks over coffee.

Quiet moments in crowded plazas. We weren’t rushing anything; we were just…

trying. Slowly mending what had been broken.

Finding the bruised pl aces inside both of us.

And doing the hard, quiet work of healing.

“You miss Seattle?” she asked me one evening in month two of my sabbatical.

“Yes.”

“You?”

“I do,” she admitted. “But…I’m not ready.”

“That’s okay.”

She looked at me and I could see her question, so I answered it after I kissed her nose. “I’ll stay here for as long as you’re here.”

“But you don’t have to,” she murmured, uncertain of my commitment.

“I do, Gigi.”

She licked her lips. “My parents want you to come to dinner—officially meet them.”

I grinned and raised my eyebrows. “Really?”

I’d met Anna Sanchez unofficially at the clinic. She called me New Hire to everyone’s amusement, including mine. I’d only had a few occasions to even be in the presence of Ignacio, who glared at me with a look that said: I have a gun, and I’m not against using it on assholes who hurt my daughter .

The fact that I was now invited meant something.

“ Ay, por fin ! Finally, yes?” Juanita lit up when I told her I’d be having dinner at the Sanchez home next Friday night.

“Now I can stop flirting with you and start flirting with him.” She tilted her head toward the new intern who’d just started the day before.

He was training to be a paramedic, and this was part of his rotation.

“Good luck.” I laughed.

Ignacio and Anna Sanchez’s home sat nestled on a hill, shaded by lemon trees and lush with color—bougainvillea climbing up iron trellises, terracotta pots spilling over with marigolds and lavender. The front door was hand-carved, old, and beautiful—one of a kind.

Inside, everything was warm wood, soft fabrics, and walls lined with art and book shelves. It didn’t feel curated—it felt lived in. Loved .

There was music playing when I arrived—some old jazz standard drifting through the rooms. Reggie met me at the door, her expression grim, and for a second, I feared she might send me back out into the street.

Instead, she said, “Don’t make this weird because they are definitely going to,” and led me in.

I was officially introduced to Anna and Ignacio.

Anna was warm and welcoming—nothing like Faye Lancaster, as I’d assumed she might be. In fact, she reminded me more of Reggie.

Ignacio, on the other hand—though not related to Faye by blood—had a quiet watchfulness about him that felt a little more like a Lancaster, which made me slightly nervous .

Dinner was served in the garden, where charming café lights crisscrossed overhead.

A long wooden table had been set under the guava tree, draped in colorful textiles and mismatched plates that still felt curated.

Handwoven napkins were folded neatly beside each setting, and candles flickered gently in glass jars.

Ignacio was at the grill, commanding it like a man who had done this a hundred times. The air was thick with the mouthwatering smells of fire-roasted peppers, garlic, citrus-marinated fish, and slow-braised pork that had been simmering since morning.

Anna poured me a glass of red wine before I could offer to help. Then she told me about how she once curated a Picasso exhibit and received hate mail for putting a Picasso next to a Rothko.

Ignacio loosened up as the evening progressed, and when they cracked a joke about family gossip being more dangerous than state secrets, which he’d been privy to before he retired, Reggie laughed.

Big. Loud. Honest.

I realized how much she was a part of her parents’ lives. How much they were a part of hers. This wasn’t just a close-knit family; it was a fortress of loyalty, humor, and history. She fit here. She belonged. And…I wanted to belong, too.

Later, over flan and cafecito , the conversation turned to work. Reggie described how she patched up a little girl with a broken wrist who’d fallen off her uncle’ s horse.

“She gets that from her mother,” Ignacio teased. “Anna once saved a Degas from water damage with a hairdryer.”

“Are you comparing a child with a painting?” Reggie said in mock exasperation.

“The Degas was priceless,” Anna huffed. “And the hairdryer was a Dyson mind you, very efficient.”

They talked easily and laughed a lot. I laughed a lot too.

This wasn’t some stiff-upper-lip Bostonian dinner table.

The Lancasters clearly came from old money, and with Ignacio—who was a top diplomat (which I half-suspected was code for spy)—this family was as polished as they came.

And yet, they weren’t speaking like royalty burdened by centuries of legacy the way my parents did.

“Are you close with your parents?” Anna asked. “As an only child, you must be.”

I’d learned that Carlos—Reggie’s brother—was very much in the picture, along with his wife. They lived abroad, but from the way Anna, Reggie, and Ignacio talked about them—knowing every detail of their lives—it was as if they lived next door.

“No,” I murmured, considering and added, “We aren’t warm the way you are, or as connected.”

“You were raised in Boston, right?” Anna asked kindly.

“Beacon Hill,” I nodded. “Mahogany walls, too many oil portraits. I was raised on legacy and guilt. ”

“Anna’s mother has several oil portraits and some mahogany walls, I’m sure,” Ignacio said gently.

I bobbed my head in agreement. “But Faye raised Anna, and I can tell you, Anna, your mum is special.”

“She certainly is.” Ignacio mock shuddered.

Anna slapped his shoulder. “Oh, stop. You know, Mum and he are thick as thieves? When she was getting you down here, she conspired with Ignacio, not me.”

Reggie pursed her lips. “I still can’t believe you did me dirty like that.”

“Oh, please!” Anna rolled her eyes. “You are delighted to have a man as capable as Dr. Graham in your clinic.”

Ignacio turned to me. “Is how you were raised the reason you stood by Dr. Loring?”

His candor disarmed me. He wasn’t pussyfooting around and neither was he being accusatory. He was, trying to understand me.

“Yes,” I admitted. “Her parents and mine are close. I couldn’t imagine her lying to me.”

“But you could imagine Reggie would…because you didn’t know her history,” Ignacio mused.

“When family name and loyalty are drilled into your skull all your life, it’s hard to pivot.

My parents aren’t unkind,” I explained, “just…efficient. Loving meant making you strong and tough. I think that’s why I didn’t know what to do with Reggie, then .

She cracked open a part of me I didn’t know was still soft. ”

“And now?” Anna asked as Reggie groaned.

“Now?” I smiled wide. “I’m cracked wide open—all hers to see and, hopefully, eventually accept.”

“This boy has some brass balls!” Ignacio muttered, amused. “He’s hitting on my daughter in my house.”

“Well, why don’t I take the temptation away,” Anna suggested and winked at me.

“Be nice, Papa.” Reggie kissed her father’s cheek and followed her mother inside the house.

Ignacio and I sat alone at the table with fairy lights above us and a bottle of Mezcal between us.

Ignacio gave me a measured look. “She’s not easy to win over.”

“I don’t expect her to be.”

He nodded, swirling the mezcal in his glass. “Good. Because if you did, you wouldn’t deserve her.”

I looked down, smelling the smokiness of the drink. “I hurt her. I know that.”

“Twice.”

“I’d take it back if I could.”

“No takebacks!” There was no malice in his words. Just simple, brutal honesty.

There were crickets somewhere in the bushes, and those sounds mingled with Anna and Reggie’s laughter floated from the kitchen window.

“I spent most of my life in diplomacy,” he drawled after a moment. “Talking around pain. Delaying hard truths. But my daughter—she’s not built like that. She doesn’t need a man who’ll protect her from discomfort. She needs someone who can stand in it with her.”

“I know, and I want to be that man.”

He looked at me—not sizing me up, not judging—but assessing the space between what I was saying and what I’d done.

“You can’t fix this by waiting for her,” he stated coolly. “You’ll have to walk through her pain with her. Let it blister you. That’s the only way she’ll believe you’re not going anywhere.”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“Don’t kid a diplomat, senor .” Ignacio chuckled. “You bare your heart to my girl. You tell her what’s in yours. Not the pretty I love you…no, the hard stuff, the fact that you didn’t believe in love because you didn’t see it when you grew up.”

My heart began to beat fast.

He was right. I hadn’t told her my story—mostly because I didn’t know how to. Hell, I hadn’t even realized I had one. Not really. Not until Reggie.

Love had always been a foreign language to me. I could recognize it in theory, maybe even pronounce the words if I tried hard enough—but I’d never spoken it fluently. Not the way she did.

For her, love was native. It was instinct. Everything she did—how she showed up, how she forgave, how she cared—was written in it.

And, I’d spent a lifetime pretending it didn’t matter, because it was easier than admitting I didn’t know what it looked like.

“Once, Anna and I had a fight. A big one. She packed up the kids and went to New York. I was in Mexico City then. Reggie was seven, and Carlos was eleven. It was summer, so they thought it was vacation time with G’Mum. I knew better.”

“What did you fight about?”

Ignacio shrugged. “I hurt her.”

It seemed like he still carried guilt and pain for putting his wife through that—but then I would as well for what I did to Reggie, until the end of my days.

“I…tried everything, the talking, the calling, the showing up… finally , I wrote her a letter.”

“And that did the trick?” I asked hopefully.

He nodded with a smile. “The thing is, words spoken in real-time can get twisted, guarded, or drowned out by fear. But a letter? She can read on her own time, in her own space. A letter can bleed. And she needed to see me bleed.”

I digested what he told me and tipped my glass toward Ignacio. “ Gracias , senor .”

He smiled, small and knowing. “Don’t thank me, just make sure my daughter can forgive the man she loves so she can be whole and happy.”